Lover of caffeine, crafting, cooking, sarcasm & wine

Ice Cream Sandwiches

Well, we’ve entered the “feels like the surface of the sun” season out here in the Southwest. I don’t know about you, but the last thing I want is a hot meal when we are dealing with record breaking heat. I’m kicking off a week of frozen treats and tips for freezing foods with this post devoted to ice cream sandwiches. Is there anything better really? These are so easy to assemble and you can really flex your creative muscle with these. I’m offering suggestions for ingredients you can mix and match to make your own dreamy treats.

Tips for making ice cream sandwiches:

Ice cream sandwiches can be tricky and I’ve had my fair share of epic fails trying to make these. Here are a few tips to help you make amazing ice cream sandwiches.

use soft cookies: If you’re baking cookies from scratch or using pre-made cookie dough, be sure to under bake these. If the cookies are crispy fresh out of the oven, they will be like a rock coming out of the freezer.

use mini-sized add-ins: Adding in chocolate chips, peanut butter cups, cookie pieces, cake pieces or any other add-in? Remember, these will freeze and become hard when frozen. I recommend using mini-chocolate chips or candies. For larger add-ins, just chop them up before mixing into the ice cream.

make in small batches: Because you’ll be working with melting ice cream, I recommend making small batches at a time. You can always wrap individual sandwiches in freezer paper and store them in larger containers.

match cookie halves in advance: There is nothing more stressful than trying to find a cookie half to complete your sandwich while ice cream melts and drips all over the place. Not that I’ve ever done that before or anything. For this reason, I love to use my Pampered Chef Ice Cream Sandwich Maker. This ensures uniform cookie halves and is easy to assemble and release. As an added bonus, you can bake your cookies, brownies, cakes, etc in this handy gadget. As an even bigger bonus, you can toss this bad boy into the dishwasher when you’re done. Holy Dishwasher Safe Kitchen Gadgets, Batman! One more thing, since these are square, buy the square shaped containers of ice cream and slice that up into squares while it’s frozen. Boom, ice cream filling to match the size of the cookie part.

Frozen Greek yogurt: add sugar, key lime juice, key lime zest, vanilla to Greek yogurt. Freeze between graham cracker sheets. Boom, key lime pie treats. For an added treat, after freezing these, dip them in white chocolate. You can do this with blueberries, strawberries, peaches, whatever kind of fruit combo you like. You can even get really fancy and make some shortbread cookies with basil and pair with a frozen strawberry Greek yogurt mixture.